Read my (digital) lips: Trans-phobia and crip-phobia doesn’t necessarily perpetuate because some people think the trans, the prosthetic, the plastic, the constructed, are monsters, but because they do not think that they need to exist. Monsters will at least linger in the shadows. But we claim we can heal the mind of the one and the body of the other. We can fix them into the model of the human, and one day do so without the prosthetics that enable the trans and the crip livelihood. We do so because humans aren’t made out of objects; humans cannot be objects. We say this & fear objectification because we consume what we objectify.I ask you: How many have you consumed this week? How many have you consumed the supply your lifestyle, for your comfortable worldview; your lifestyle as human, your worldview of humanism? How many trans-disabled bodies have been abjected and objectified, expelled from homes, left to fend for themselves by selling themselves sexually or get caught up in drug rings, abused by the police, and imprisoned to abused by guards or simply left to commit suicide with the current percentage of 50% of all trans persons dying by their own hand by the age of 20. This is not because of your indifference, but because your participation in capitalist, social, legal structures that actively sets transphobic limits on the access to the human, that see that the non or less human are dying, imprisoned, impoverished.We can claim ignorance, partially deliberate ignorance, on our participation in these deaths. You can feel removed from the deaths, sanitized from them, and act as though the streets where you live doesn’t mean that with your money, your votes (or lack of votes), and your general disinterested desire for expediency and comfort that you aren’t silently telling someone “please, exploit and kill, just don’t make me have to think about it.” Ignorance is not innocence. Ignorance is saying that I wish to kill without feeling or thinking about it. This violent exploitation does not occur because of hate, but because we do not regard our victims as a valuable human; for the human in humanism is value itself. He is a rich and modern ivory god.

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Every day we sacrifice on the altar to this deity. You may say you must, but at very least count the cost. Know you are paying the cost with others lives and livelihood. That means transforming how we read bodies; by reading not like a humanist; by reading monstrously. Humanist ideology teaches that a knight doesn’t need the horse, the armor, the court or the Church to be a knight, he was most a knight by just being a noble human. Humanists look back, even today, and assume that the medieval thought the same way. They did not. They knew that a knight included the horse, the armor, the court, the Church, and yes this very limited thing with two arms and legs. Only when these things came together did we have a knight who can do all the things a knight can do.Medievals imagined persons as prosthetic monsters, as composites of things acting together and transforming one another. They theorized them in their literature and recorded them in their courts. This is vital. The first step in forming a world in which transforming bodies can find livable lives is to begin by imagining them. This paper is about transforming bodies, and so it invokes a trans politics of reading. I argue that by changing how we read the networks which produce and are recognized as human, we can change our interaction with that marco-political machines which silence, isolate, dispossess, and monitor changing bodies by changing our interaction with the micro-politics of reading.We use reading, because reading demonstrates power as it enacts power, as do the courts of kings and the courts of judges. We are the literary, the medical, the legal, the societal. We are the machine. We are the humans that the machine produces. We are also the monsters rattling cages. We can imagine along with two medieval non-modern court records, the werewolf lais of Bisclavret by Marie de France and the London Plea record of the transgender prostitute John/Eleanor, and through them discover four methods for practicing our lives & professions in less trans-phobic ways: 1) listening, 2) advocating, 3) redistributing resources, and 4) at a certain point, stop our reading.

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Method #1: Listening for Monsters

We begin with the trials already in session. The State has captured two monsters walking through its dominion, which it will present, examine, and judge for their worthiness to exist. Monitoring, policing, and in a sense producing, the bounds of the human is a chief activity of the States concerned. This observation, this listening for monsters so to speak, if proceeded in a way which listens without automatically pre-scripting or anticipating responses can allow for the novel to present itself in its own language, and begin us listening to monsters instead.The 1st trial is in the 12th century British court of King Arthur, that of Bisclavret. His hunting party has turned up on accident a monster, a werewolf in his woods. “When the hounds were unleashed, they ran across Bisclavret; the hunters and the dogs chased him all day, until they were just about to tear him apart, at which point he saw the King and ran to him pleading for mercy.” He will hear the case of this monster in order to judge whether it is human enough to be given the right to life. Forestalling its doom, the King issues that it will not be harmed, but kept and monitored as a pet: the king “held him very dear./ He commanded all his followers/ for the sake of their love for him, to guard Bisclarel well…every day he went to sleep/among the knights, near the king.” Thus for Bisclavret, he is temporally given the dignity of both worlds he inhabits. Insofar as he is a man and a knight, he lives among knights at court. Insofar as he is a beast, he grovels as a domesticated animal before the King’s seat at dinner, begging for scraps. While the transforming body is read, it’s given agency & life. It’s policed within State dominance, but so long as it can keep its interest, it may hold trans-phobic aggression at bay.The second trial in sessions is the 14th century London court, that of John/Eleanor. The police have turned up from its watch a prosthetic monster, a transgender woman charged with prostitution. The London Plea and Memoranda Record is opened to hear her case, unusual for this sort of situation, for the charge is not prostitution, but sodomy; doubly usual because prostitution was not usually criminal and sodomy was not usually handled by the courts, but the Church. Then we find out that this prostitute is a transgender woman, explaining the sodomy claim but not the rest of the very particular attention she is receiving. In fact, the whole plea, which John/ Eleanor confesses, reads far more like a life-story than evidence for a conviction. John/Eleanor tells how she entered into a brothel, learned how to transform herself into a woman and began prostituting. The plea is taken down in Latin, as opposed to English; also unusual. John/Eleanor’s gender is’nt identified by pronouns, a feature of anonymity Latin allows unlike English. The very language attends to John/Eleanor and allows her to exist in her monstrosity.

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Method #2: Speaking for Monsters

While to a great extent silenced, as they are mostly nullified by the control and absence of protection in the State’s rule, monsters are not without hope if they have advocates. If those who have a recognized and recognizable voice within the courts work to speak on behalf of those who are not recognized, then reforms can begin to be made towards the livelihood of monsters.The werewolf is fortunate enough to have such advocates. When it so happened that Bisclavret is faced with his former wife and her new husband, still possessing his means of self-support and means of becoming recognizably a knight, he lashes out against them and would be killed for this transgression, still under the watch of the state, if the community did not come to its defense: “All over the palace people said that we wouldn’t have acted that way without reason: that somehow or other, the knight had mistreated Bisclavret” and so his execution was again forestalled and his case was investigated. It is by this investigation that Bisclavret’s disenfranchisement as a human, a knight, and a member of the society is brought to light and his prosthetics which gave to him this masculine subjectivity are returned. When his prosthetics and livelihoods are returned and he does not immediately reveal his trans-forming body before the court; yet again an advocate comes in to speak on his behalf to alter the direction of the court, arguing to the King that “This beast wouldn‘t under any circumstances in order to get rid of his animal form, put on clothes in front of you; you don‘t understand what he means: he‘s just too ashamed to do it here./ Have him led to your chambers and bring the clothes with him;/then we‘ll leave him alone for a while.” The advocate is listened to; Bisclavret receives private agency.Unlike our werewolf, John/Eleanor is not so lucky in her advocates. Witnesses come in to collaborate John/Eleanor’s confessions, from her training in the brothel to the men and women she frequently had sex with. One of John/Eleanor’s Johns, John Britby admits to the court that he solicited sex from John/Eleanor but repeats in his confession and the pronouns he uses that to him she was a woman. Elizabeth, the woman who taught John/Eleanor her tricks, along with her daughter Alice, affirm John/Eleanor’s story, upholding a brothel and embroidery store in which John/Eleanor practices both arts. While these witnesses affirm John/Eleanor’s story and highlight the illegible place she falls between the London laws regarding prostitution and sodomy, they do not advocate for any change in the State’s decision. In fact while the plea does not end in a conviction, nor does it end in liberation, it simply ends. The State’s trans-phobia, homo-phobia, bigotry, and its indifference are not in any way abated, and we are left to imagine her fate.

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Method #3: Resources for Monsters

State systems which respect the unexpected individuality of the monsters, social realities still dispossess them of their livelihood and prosthetic forms of embodiment. Thus our interests in protecting and affirming the material needs of the monster should not be disinterested, for that only passes off the violence against the monstrous to other agents, but must take an active role in transforming and protecting the material circumstances of at risk or dispossessed.For our werewolf, Bisclavret, the needs of living as a human and the animal require the simultaneous protection of his knightly and bestial means of support and protection. As a knight he is able to stand guard over his castle and the surrounding forest, but as a wolf, he is at risk of losing not only both but also his prosthetics, his clothes, by which he can return to human form and agency. He must “go stark naked” leaving his clothes in a stone, under watch of his wife, where he hopes they will remain sheltered “until I‘m ready to come home” as he says, “were [I] to lose them / And then be discovered. / I‘d stay a werewolf forever. / I‘d be helpless / Until I got them back.” Revealing this vulnerability to his wife, he places the means of his life and human form in her hands, which she may protect or exploit. The wife takes advantage of this possession to dispossess him of his lands and humanity, thus dispossess herself of one husband so that she might possess another. The state recognizes her remarriage, because of its indifference. It does not recognize Bisclavret’s trans-body, nor make provisions for preserving its prosthetic needs.The case of John/Eleanor presents very different issues and solutions for the dispossessed prosthetic monster. We hear in the plea record that John came to a brothel in order to live and work there. This is compelling: there were many options for the impoverished, dispossessed male, to make a living on the streets of London. John, in transforming into Eleanor through prosthetics, does not simply take on the financial elements of the life, but goes through the day to day events as a woman. Nor were acts of male prostitution completely unheard of. What we see here cannot be simply reduced to financial need, nor desire to have sex with men, although these may have played a factor. There is something enjoyable, perhaps more livable in existing as Eleanor. In this way Elizabeth and her daughter Alice in offering John a place to work and survive, and the prosthetics to become Eleanor, offer him a way to live. It is these means of a livable life which are taken away, held, and perhaps even punished by the courts.

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Method # 4: Liberation for Monsters

However we might listen, advocate, and supply them with the needs of life & livelihood, monsters cannot be tamed, monsters cannot be understood, even by those who wish well. While exploring “the Body Hybrid,”Of Giants, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes the monstrous as “a body enraptured by an unstable, nonteleological process of transformation.” Likewise Judith Butler tells us that in the presence of the monster as other: “the nonviolent [reading] lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be." But the State cannot live with unknowingness, it can only define and confine. Our gifts of agency & justice to monsters depends on permitting of them to return to the shadows.In the 12th centuries, monsters may not come from the wilderness, but that is where they live. There werewolf can be himself, “in the thickest part of the woods.”“During the week he would be missing/ for three whole days, and [his wife] didn’t know what happened to him or where he went.” This stolen time and place, quietly away from his wife and the text’s narration may raise our suspicions. Does he hunt human, as Marie de France says werewolfs do? Does he have a werewolf mistress? What does his transformation or transformed states look like? Bisclavret does not reveal any of these things. He leaves the ordered world of the human, and undresses from his humanity, and we know no more until the hunting party finds him. But even with his acquittal, his monstrous life does not continue, cannot continue, while we watch. “Bring the clothes with [Bisclavret]” the King is instructed “leave him alone a while/ if he turns into a man, we‘ll know.” We do know. He does return as man. As a knight he submits to our gaze, but his trans life remains beyond our gaze, in wilderness and behind doors we must leave unopened.A key factor of John/Eleanor confessions is that it’s a confession. The monster tells us so much willingly, satiates ours and the state’s desire to know, to halt our desire from going further. Michel Foucault has much to say about how states torture, cut open, and lay clear every physical portion of a body in order to extract the confession from it that would justify its violence in doing so. In stepping forward and giving us one narrative of her life, John/Eleanor sets the limits on us knowing more than one narrative. It is our lack of knowledge that kept her safe on the streets until then and it may be our lack of knowledge that may protect her from judicial decree. Since only women could be found guilty of prostitution and only men can be guilty of the sodomy of oral or anal sex as such. John/Eleanor falls between the cracks of these two methods of knowing and thus may have escaped judgment. And yet, we do not know for sure. Her case ends without a sentence and without further narration. She disappears into the wilderness of silence, or inarticulate noise of the city, that she erupted momentarily out from.In conclusion, what do we do about our modern humanist violence? How do we begin to care, count the cost, and act? We read. We read what people usually don’t read. We read medieval literature. We read for prosthetic monsters. We choose to attend, we choose to imagine, we let what we see and imagine change us; that is reading. Yes, reading problematic, reading presents ethical dilemmas, because reading is active. We must shatter the model of the passive, helpless and unhelpful reader by reading actively, as activists. Hwait! That is the word which begins Beowulf, a tale of monsters. It tells us to wait. To listen. Slow down form where you are going for a moment. Attend to what is going on, what you are doing. The practice of active listening, as with active reading, is an often abject practice: a monstrous practice which we will now rehearse. We will imagine the monsters that we have hidden and our own non-modern, prosthetic, post-human monstrosity. Go ahead, little monsters, put your paws up, and (be) read.